Category: Happiness & Emotions

If you google goal setting you’ll find thousands of results about S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a widely used and great method, often used also in corporate environment. However, it is misses a couple of aspects of goal setting. Here are my problems with SMART goals.

When the year-end is coming, many people start to think about what they accomplished during that year. It is a great opportunity to stop and do self-reflection. Whether you are a person who likes New Year’s resolutions and goalsetting or the person who prefers to live at the moment, self-reflection will definitely have positive impacts on you.

We live our lives in continuous connection with others. Internet gives us a lot of opportunities to avoid human contact, but it does not mean you do not need to communicate with others. Actually I think it became even more important to be able to express our thoughts and feelings effectively. We may need to prepare ourselves for public speaking for a job or explain something to our family. Communication is an essential part of our lives.

We can hear mindfulness nowadays a lot, but it still seems a little bit mysterious thing. What is mindfulness really about? How can you implement it into your daily life? Let’s see first Wikipedia’s description of it:

“Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and through other training.”

Even though Star Wars is “just” a science-fiction, it is full of learnings what we can implement. George Lucas studied Eastern cultures and created a world where Jedi are guardians of peace and justice. Whether you like Star Wars or not, you should read the teachings of the Jedi, because the principles they apply are valid for our everyday lives.

The literature, theaters and movies are full of stories of diaries. People since centuries has been writing about what happened to them, recording their feelings and memories. In our digital world, we have plenty of opportunities to record all these things. Does it still make sense to write a diary?

Long and meaningless team meetings? A colleague who criticizes every new idea? Or total chaos in your head with emotions and rational thoughts?

No problem. Edward De Bono’s method: the six thinking hats can give you solutions for these problems. It was originally designed for group decision making discussions, but it can be used very effectively also for individual decision making.

Let’s try it to be sure!

A couple of years ago I saw my friends posting about #100happydays, and I decided to try it with a friend. Since we did not feel like sharing our private life details with everyone in the world, we modified the original challenge. Instead of posting everything on the social media, we sent e-mails to each other with pictures and with a short explanation. Every day for 100 days in a row we found at least a moment of happiness, satisfaction or joy. The project was so successful that I decided to repeat it with another friend next year and right now I am doing my 3rd challenge!